Oct 25
If I were granted one wish in this little world of education and ICT it would be simple – the Death of PowerPoint.
Don’t get me wrong – PowerPoint is a fantastic program. Using it, it’s so quick and easy to create digital presentations, and being part of the office suite it looks and feels like Word, Access and Excel, so learning how to use PowerPoint actually teaches you the basics of using other applications. There’s only one problem – as a profession, we have replaced the slate with the jotter for the PowerPoint presentation. The result is monumental disinterest.
The sad thing is, I have now seen numerous teachers thinking they have made their classroom engaging for their students with PowerPoint, and then wonder in disbelief that ‘wee Johnny’ still misbehaves and can’t focus on work undertaken in class. Can we stop right there please?
I strongly suspect that for the vast majority, all PowerPoint has done is give accompanying words and pictures to what is essentially a lecture.
Think about it. We teach digital natives. Having words or pictures on a screen is hardly grasping their attention. After all, it’s just something to look at. With this in mind, there have always been the posters around your room, or last months’ project displayed on the walls. Failing that, there is always the window to look out of. Don’t forget, this is the generation that has the amazing ability to watch television without actually watching it – after all, many have been sitting in front of a television ever since they could focus their eyes.
I know, I know, some of you will be decrying my cynicism, and many of you will point out that you use ‘animated gifs’ in your presentations to make them lively and interesting, or worse still, you have become a Grand Master in the use of ‘custom animation’ and ‘slide transitions’ to give your presentations ‘wow factor’. Congratulations. I wonder what career those all important ‘life skills’ will help you and/or your students in.
At University I remember being told (on more than one occasion) that a lecture was a “ means through which to get the information contained in the teachers notes to the students notes without passing through either’s heads”. I wondered why then this was the preferred method of delivery.
I was more troubled when I realised that this was also the principal means of delivery used in the TEI when I studied for my PGCE.
The instance that prompted this diatribe was sitting with a look and feeling of abject horror last session when the head of post-graduate training at one of out TEIs addressed the national Masterclass coordinators forum, and said how delighted she was (does that give away who it was?) that so many of the PGDE students were now “ doing PowerPoints” on their placements.
I worry that nameless HMIE’s travel the country ticking boxes that ICT is being used effectively in the classroom when they see a digital projector and PowerPoint in action.
We have fundamentally missed the point.
ICT. Information and Communications Technology.
We need to use ICT to engage. We need to use ICT to help learners take control of their own learning. Using technology and other pedagogies, we can help foster constructivist, self-directive learners. Some are doing this extremely well. Others aren’t touching it with a bargepole. Why not? I suppose many fear the loss of control. But by not doing this, we are turning students off education.
ICT can add to making education dynamic. It can also arguably do the one thing that good teachers can’t realistically do on their own – give access to knowledge and learning at any time and place of the students choosing.
My heart goes out to those in the ‘comfort zone’. I know teachers have little time to learn ‘yet another ICT skill’, but please ask yourself this simple question – what do you achieve by using PowerPoint in the classroom?
Education is fundamentally about choices. Technology can inform those choices.
The power of ICT is making a huge world small. The trick to harnessing the power of ICT is making it interactive.
The program that the world is talking about for interaction is Macromedia Flash. It really started as a web animation program, but has since grown arms and legs. Flash is interactive. Flash gives instant feedback. Flash makes the web cool.
There’s only one problem – Flash is hard. It took me months to learn how to use Flash in its simplest format. Maybe I’m a slow learner, but do you know something? It was worth it.
Macromedia obviously realised that Flash was hard. They have since brought out 2 brilliant additions to the Flash family – Captivate and Breeze, that are far simpler to use. If you want to make interactive simulations of what happens on a computer doing anything, then what you want is Captivate (only for PC I’m afraid – no Mac version). If however you want to make your PowerPoint presentations interactive, add narration, stand alone or be included on web pages, then what you want is Breeze. The best thing about Breeze? There is hardly any learning curve, as all it does is add a new menu into your existing PowerPoint program. The good news however is that it allows you to save your presentation as Flash – therefore you can put it in a website, and track student progress through the interactions.
Why not just keep using PowerPoint with hyperlinks I hear you cry? Even a Grand Master of PowerPoint can only make it slightly interactive. What we need is engaging multimedia content, which Flash can provide.
There are very few programs that have caught the interest of the teaching profession, and even fewer that have caught their imagination. In my travels, I have seen excellent use of digital imagery, digital sound and am beginning to see creative use of the web for communication and stimulating intellectual curiosity, but equally, I have seen dismal use of PowerPoint.
PowerPoint doesn’t have to be linear. If you don’t know this, check out the section in the Help & Training site about ‘hyperlinks‘. Imagine if students could choose what happens next in the presentation? Using hyperlinks they can do this.
Do your presentations work if you weren’t there? Can your students access your presentations ‘on demand’? Do they stand alone, or do you really need to add your narrative as students work their way through them? Using Breeze you can add audio commentaries and interactions to your PowerPoint presentations and save them as Flash. If you want to know more about this, check out the ‘Breeze’ section in ‘Projects‘, or get in touch with me.
Want to learn Flash? Check out my notes in the ‘downloads‘ section. Download a free 30 day trial of Flash from Macromedia. Buy it for your school – it costs about £50 per machine. Students and teachers can buy the whole Macromedia Studio 8 suite for themselves for £75. Breeze? The Local Authority purchased this in September 2004. Once it’s set up, it’ll be free for anyone who wants to use it.
It’s time to move out of our comfort zone.
PowerPoint is dead.
Long live Flash.
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